


in this life

by mortalitasi



Series: hil do lok [1]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Adventure, Angst and Humor, F/M, General, Humor, Other, bickering. lots of bickering., i guess you could call this a rivalmance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 14:18:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13215543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: Liette Soldamil is in the highly competitive business of making questionable decisions.Becoming the World-Eater's babysitter (and bodyguard) may just be worst one she's made yet.





	1. cold's gold

Once, in another life, her mother had told her winning was a state of mind.  
  
And it truly is, she supposes, because lying there on her back in the icy snow, Liette Soldamil does not feel as though she has won anything, least of all a battle deciding the fate of the world. She also supposes that she is now a hero, though that is another thing she does not feel, among others, such as her hands, lips, and bits of her feet.  
  
Should she rise to find that her ears have fallen off from a case of spontaneous and acute frostbite, she would not be surprised. The clear, freezing chill of Monahven is unique—it sometimes hurts to breathe up here, where the air feels like it is whittling away bits of her lungs every time she inhales. She sits up with all the decorum to be expected of someone who has just fallen from the sky and out of a blessed afterlife, wincing when the cut in her side pulls.  
  
It hadn't hurt in Sovngarde. She misses the place already, with its sweet wind and rolling hills and spinning skies. She would have stayed forever, if she could. _If_. She'll have to make do, just as she always has. The climb she makes to stand on her feet is slow and unsteady, but she manages in the end, bracing herself along the wall Paarthurnax so loves to perch on. The dragon's absence unnerves her. She has never known him to leave the peak in all the time they have been acquainted, and she had been looking forward to discussing what had transpired in Sovngarde with him.  
  
Dragon-slaying, to the shock of many, is not something she's been doing for a particularly long time. She remembers years where the height of her accomplishments was getting so blindly drunk that she couldn't tell the difference between a breton and a khajiit—that had ended very badly, from what bits and pieces she _could_ recall—and she sometimes misses the lack of care she used to move through the world with.  
  
Orphan, homeless bosmer sounds a good deal less complicated and intimidating than Dragonborn, Thane of Whatsitsmarch or Boggymarsh or We Only Ever Serve Burned Mutton, depending on who you heard it from, purveyor of a land apparently ruled solely by frost trolls. The first could go virtually anywhere and escape notice as well. The second would be lucky to have a moment's peace in a well-populated city.  
  
She balances on trembling legs, wiping the hair from her face, and wishes she were able to fly so she could reach a warm bath posthaste. She's never wanted one more before in her life, and her life has been long... by human standards, anyway.  
  
The thief makes her way around the stone and is halfway through her hundredth prayer of thankfulness when she realizes the snowdrift between her and the next boulder has moved three feet away from where it originally was in the first place.  
  
Snowdrifts, in her experience, are rather stationary things, unless they happen to have other, nastier reasons to be crawling around. Reason that aren't _the wind_. She used to tell herself that a lot when she was younger— it was only the wind, she'd think, and then end up with another hand in a splint or a new burn to add to her ever-growing collection. Youth is a funny thing, she decides just as a grey hand rises out of the white, spidery and searching. She stands there, for all intents and purposes rooted to the ground, watching as the drift parts down the middle, barely feeling the freezing wind as it makes her tattered cloak billow and flutter around her legs.  
  
He is unlike any man she has ever seen. That is to say, not any man at all, if the great, sweeping horns are any indication of it. They curve up and away over his head, strangely familiar, strands of his dark hair webbing between them, soaked from the melting snow.  
  
She becomes increasingly aware of how she must look like a gaping, slack-jawed fool, but cannot bring herself to be much else as the man moves and the frost gathered on his shoulders sluices down over the unkind lines of his arms. He shifts again and the fabric hanging around him glints in the winter sun—and she realizes as it slips from him and pools on his knees that fabric is the last thing it could be. Nothing else in this world has that tough, glancing aspect. Nothing looks like them, or feels like them; nothing else sounds like the rasp of scales when a dragon stirs itself and breathes.  
  
Liette is clutching at her lucky amulet with numb fingers, fumbling, when the man in the black dragonskin lurches forward, supported only on two taloned hands. His nails click and screech against the stone and she grimaces, the cold of Monahven forgotten. He takes a deep, heaving breath, as though he has spent his life lacking in air, and opens his eyes.  
  
There is the familiarity again, heavy and thick, sitting at the bottom of her stomach, weighted with dread. The man growls, an unintelligible mash of sounds and tone—messy, and he is displeased with it. He gnashes his teeth, the flash of his fangs pale behind his dusky mouth, but then he gathers courage again, looking up at her. He speaks. Hisses. One word. The scarlet of his stare burns everything else away, and it's then that she knows.  
  
" _Dovahkiin_." 

 

* * *

 

If you'd asked her for a list of aspirations for the future when she was younger, she couldn't have told you for certain what things would be on that list— she could, however, tell you what _wouldn't be_ , and she is sure that one of them would definitely, most totally and utterly not involve dragging an unconscious, half-naked, not-quite-man down the slope of the steepest mountain in the country.  
  
Breathe.  
  
In, out, she thinks as she tries to ignore the sagging deadweight of the man-beast with the scary eyes on her shoulder that is making one of her knees dip into the snow. She should have left him up there, she tells herself as she slips on a crumbled rock and nearly goes flying. A mountain goat watches their slow, ambling progress from a crag above, chewing disinterestedly at the strangled sound of horror that leaves her when she almost loses her balance. Blasted goats. How do they even survive up here? Between the trolls and the harsh winds and the constant snow and frost and ice, _she's_ having a hard time just being able to keep track of her own thoughts.  
  
Then again, all of Skyrim's wildlife seems to have this mulish, stubborn way of simply refusing to die. The goat is still masticating with agonizing thoroughness as she shambles down the path, apparently weary with the effort of just continuing to exist. She decides she very much dislikes its wide, dark, unblinking eyes when she starts down what must be the fifteenth flight of stairs she's climbed since descending from the peak of Monahven— and the halfway point is far off yet.  
  
She looks at the twisting spiral of stairs hewn into the mountainside and feels like dropping her cumbersome burden and advancing alone.  
  
He is slowing her progress, he's entirely unpleasant in demeanor, and he had tried (unsuccessfully, of course) to more or less wring her neck straight after he'd finished hissing and spitting at her—luckily, he'd also collapsed face-first into the snow after what she supposed was stress or shock had caught up with him, and he hasn't batted so much as an eyelid since. She's not sure whether she should be glad or worried for it. She doesn't even know why she's expending energy moving him, but here she is, wading through snow and freezing with a goat as audience to what could be the last moments of her very long life.  
  
_I never got to tell Nazeem to go stuff himself,_ she thinks regretfully as another stone comes loose beneath her heel.


	2. rise and shine, sunspine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> translations at the end!

As fate would have it, she had not yet broken her neck, let go of the unconscious lizard-man, _or_ died by the time she's arrived at the gates of High Hrothgar's sanctuary, though she's soaked to the bone with melted snow, and dropping the knocked-out fool is now beginning to become more of an attractive idea by the minute.  
  
She looks down at his prone face, feeling the pronounced ache in one of her shoulders where the end of a horn of his is poking into her skin… and remembering the way he lunged for her only maybe an hour ago, clawed hands outstretched.  
  
Yes, abandonment does seem _very_ attractive of an idea indeed. For some crazy reason, though, she only kicks open the gate with one wobbly foot and shuffles her way to the middle of the courtyard, letting the man's legs drag behind her carelessly. She's too tired to carry him properly and he's too far gone to appreciate the gesture anyway—also, _too bloody tall_ —though she has a feeling being awake wouldn't help his charming disposition much, if the way he had pounced for her is anything to go by.  
  
"Master Borri," she croaks to the human crouched by one of the stone monuments in the yard, horrified at the sound of her own hoarse voice.  The back of the Greybeard straightens and stiffens in surprise. They hadn't been expecting her to return, of course. So much for faith.  
  
He turns silently, unspeaking, but the gleam of his widening eyes beneath the cowl of his hood tells her all she needs to know.  
  
"I need to see Arngeir," Liette says when he doesn't move. Another long moment stretches between them. The man on her shoulder sags nearer to the ground by just an inch, a talon grazing the earth. Her legs scream in protest. " _Now_ ," she growls, and watches Borri scramble away with a savage sort of glee. At least she isn't beyond inspiring some sort of hurry.  
  
If she had known what Arngeir would have looked like when she dumped her little present on one of the spare bedrolls in the meditation hall, she'd have pressed herself to get to the room faster.  
  
"Dovahkiin," Arngeir says as though that explains everything, and she watches him with a question in her brown-red gaze. "What… who is this?"  
  
She lets herself fall to the bedroll adjacent to the one currently occupied and shrugs off her soaking cloak. It makes a wet, squelchy sound when it falls to the floor. "I was hoping you would have the answer to that," she tells him, and shakes out her hair. The ends of it slap against the hem of her leather vest and it occurs to her that it may be time for a trim.  
  
Arngeir kneels, and with the clinical touch of a healer he pushes the prone man's head to the side. His fingers linger over the hard rash of bony scale on the curve of the jaw and then move up to where the skin of the scalp swirls into horn, the oddest mixture of soft and unyielding. In all the time she has known him, Liette has not seen Arngeir ever so puzzled. The pucker of his brow has never been so fierce and deep; all the lines on his face seem etched in coal now, dark and terribly visible, and she remembers just how old he's considered to be—how old he is in his wisdom, and how it makes him and his brothers so hesitant to act.  
  
"He is not dremora," the master finally says. It almost makes her laugh. She instead yanks off her gloves and hisses at the feeling of the warm air on her fingers.  
  
"No," she agrees, tossing one glove aside, "he is not."  
  
Arngeir's eyes are hard and cold and grey as flint when he lifts them to her. "Why have you brought him here?"  
  
Now she scowls, teeth white and sharp against the golden-brown of her mouth. "What would you have had me do? Leave him on the peak to freeze?"  
  
The master's silence is all the reply she needs.  
  
"Oh, jolly good. Very merciful of you," she says lightly. "I seem to remember something about the Greybeards being neutral…?"  
  
Arngeir draws himself up swiftly, his mouth pulling unhappily. "This is no jesting matter," he snaps, his voice acquiring the edge it always does when he's losing patience with her—which, all things considered, is not quite as often as she'd thought it be. The unforgiving line of Arngeir's lips becomes flatter with strain. "It was his destiny to be destroyed."  
  
Destiny, she thinks. How she has come to hate that word. Bitterness floods her mouth.  
  
"I watched him die," she says, and it isn’t a lie.  
  
She remembers the jar in the air as the World-Eater had been torn asunder from the inside out, the very fibers of his soul straining and stretching to tear themselves apart. The surge of power and vestigial, inhuman rage that had screamed forth from the dragon's collapsing body had knocked every single person in the clearing off their feet, dead or not—even the mighty Tsun, a dozen times her size and weight, had stumbled back on his gigantic tree-trunk legs and lost his balance.  
  
Yes, Alduin had most certainly died.  Or rather, most of him had.  
  
"He cannot be dead and breathing both, Dovahkiin," Arngeir replies coolly,  regarding her with thinly-veiled displeasure.  
  
Out of all the times they've talked, the priest now decides to acquire a sense of humor. Very appropriate. She shifts in her clothes and returns Arngeir's half-glare with a raised brow.  
  
"I am not killing him again," Liette states. "Once was hard enough." _Not unless he tries to first_ , she adds silently for her own benefit. She somehow can't convince herself that telling Arngeir the lizard-man's only instinct upon awakening had been to choke her would endear the master to him.  
  
Arngeir's next words are tightly spoken, as though he's ready to burst. "You will stay with him until he is awake, then," the Greybeard says, standing and striking the dust from his robes. "Make no mistake: these halls are not suited for a beast the likes of the World-Eater. I will not hesitate to cast you out if you cannot control him. We will wait for Master Paarthurnax's return and then seek his counsel, but this sanctuary will not be offered forever."  
  
Ah, so they did know Paarthurnax was absent—and so very friendly about it, too.  
  
"I'll do my best to keep him from chewing your furnishings," she assures Arngeir and smiles a little when a vein on his forehead springs to prominence.  
  
"Supper is served at the sixth bell. You are welcome to meditate with us if you so wish."  
  
Getting the invitation out must have been a feat indeed because as soon as it is said Arngeir turns on his heel, and, tucking his hands into the long sleeves of his robes, walks away briskly at a pace Liette has not known many humans his age to be able to reproduce. His footsteps echo and fade.  
  
_Meditation._ Bah. And why had he been talking like she’d just scooped up some unruly stray— _control_ him? Please.  
  
She is left alone with the fire hissing in the braziers and the growing annoyance of her dripping vest. She rolls her shoulders out of it and hangs it to dry on one of the unlit fixtures, listening to it steam as it is exposed to the heat. She slips her boots off as well and turns them upside-down and when that is done she is at a loss about what to fix next, so she simply sits there, legs crossed, the chill crawling from her skin, and listens to the lizard-man breathe.  
  
Wonderful.

 

* * *

  

The lit braziers crackle merrily.  
  
It’s quiet, as expected—you could hear a pin drop in this gloomy place—the only real sounds that are in any way noticeable are the pop and snap of the flames, and the drawing pull of the World-Eater’s breath. He doesn’t seem to be asleep so much as he is _passed out_ , and thank all gods existent and otherwise that it’s so, because otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to peel the dragonskin clinging to him like… well, a second skin.  
  
It lies discarded in a corner—she hadn’t been willing to leave the room, afraid that once she had her attention off of him he’d pop up like a spring daisy—piled over itself, silky, dark as ebon, and just about near the top of weirdest things she’s ever touched. And that list is really very long.  
  
Good news is, she’s dry now, and substantially less cranky without her hair sticking to every plane of her cheeks and shoulders, despite the fact that the only thing she has available to her is to _watch_. The bedroll isn’t nearly big enough to accommodate the size of the one lying on it, which is why she’d taken the liberty of shoving another one next to it before scrambling an appropriate distance away.  
  
It’s fascinating to see how far the scales reach, really—there are swatches of them at his hips and elbows, down his back and legs, on his wrists and knuckles, his shoulders, even some at the back of his neck and dotting the sloping expanse of his collarbones. Yes, he’s about as naked as the day he was born—or made, or magicked into creation, or whatever is done to make dragons come to be, though he certainly didn’t _enter_ the world in this form. The Alduin she remembers was a little bigger. Had a little bit more wing. Definitely not angrier, though—that level of murderous rage is just about the same, actually.  
  
She has to wonder if she’s guessed wrong, but there really is no one else it could be. Scarlet eyes. Black scales. A single-minded urge to kill. His voice—unmistakable. Doesn’t sound like anyone else she knows. If she can claim to even know him.  
  
He comes around with a flail and a gasp, trying to sit up and failing, and she would have laughed at the tangle of him in the covers and furs if he weren’t so pointedly looking around for something to focus his anger on. He finally catches sight of her, sitting cross-legged and back to the wall, and lurches forward, almost falling flat on his face.  
  
“ _You_ ,” he snarls, lips pulled back in a horrendous growl.  
  
“Me,” is her intelligent reply.  
  
The sound he makes promises more than just pain and crosses over into the territory of detail-oriented maiming. Good old torture.  
  
“You will _fix_ this,” he spits, trying to find purchase on trembling arms. She guesses dragons have no rules about nudity, considering all they wear is scales, so it only makes sense he wouldn’t be ashamed or paying attention now that he’s—downsized. “You will fix this, or I will—”  
  
She clears her throat. “Kill me?”  
  
That does nothing to soothe his foul mood. His handsome features contort with spite. “ _Zu’u fen ag hin kii!_ ”¹  
  
“That’s not very nice,” she mumbles as he fights to get his claws loose from where they’re stuck in the bedding.  
  
“I am not _nice_ ,” he sneers. “And you are a pathetic, pitiful, insignificant little _lir_ —a worm!”  
  
She scowls back. “I know what the word means,” she shoots back, and it occurs to her that’s probably not what she should be protesting at the moment. “I didn’t do this to you, for what it’s worth.”  
  
He hisses at her, again, pointed teeth bared. “ _Liar_.”  
  
She scoffs. “Believe what you want. I thought you were gone for good before I was brought back.”  
  
The anger takes a backseat, if just for an instant, to some kind of self-aware horror. He takes in a wavering breath. “I died.”  
  
“You did,” she agrees, not really knowing what else to say.  
  
Now the rage is back. “ _You_ killed me.”  
  
“You were planning to destroy the world!”  
  
He slams a fist down on the floor, making her jump. “It is my _birthright_!”  
  
“I couldn’t let you!”  
  
The volume of her voice seems to take him by surprise and they look at each other for a bit, suddenly acutely aware of how strange their circumstances are.  
  
He stares down at his hands, as if he’s truly seeing them for the first time. “What is this?” he rasps, turning his head this way and that to survey the mess of bedrolls he’s lying in, the state of the room, the strange heap in the corner. His expression softens, edged out with dread. “Where are… _viing_ …?”²  
  
The vulnerability in that question makes her uncomfortable. “Look,” she says awkwardly, “I found you—this way. And…”  
  
His glare bores into her from across the room. “Mock me, and I will crush you.”  
  
“I wasn’t going to—and you’re not doing _any_ crushing in that state,” she jibes, taken aback by the sudden shift in his demeanor. “You are a bloody bitter lizard, aren’t you?”  
  
“ _What_ did you call me?”  
  
“A bloody bitter lizard! Did I stutter?”  
  
He lunges for her, launching in her direction with surprising velocity. He falls short by a whole legion of feet, but that doesn’t quell the fervor of his efforts at all. She inches out of his reach, standing to be better prepared in the highly unlikely event that she’ll need to run. It’s almost sad, seeing him like this.  
  
“Filth,” he breathes out between clenched teeth.  
  
Well. She _did_ say almost.  
  
“I can’t believe I was actually feeling sorry for you,” Liette says.  
  
His jaw clicks shut with an audible snap. “Cur,” he says, with all the venom he can muster—which is quite a lot.  
  
She sniffs. “More creative than the last, at least.”  
  
Silence, for just a second.  
  
“ _Fus!_ ”  
  
It takes her off guard—the potency of the Shout is well above average, despite being just one word long, and though she doesn’t lose her balance completely, she does stumble. It’s enough. He strikes, quick as a snake, in a surprising show of regained equilibrium, latching onto her ankle: his fingers are so long they have no problem closing completely about her joint like a vice. She only manages a strangled, affronted yelp before he yanks, hard, and she tumbles to the ground, cracking her elbow soundly on the floor. She’s still rattling off curses in Bosmeris when he releases her to put his hands around her throat instead.  
  
“Ack—off— _get_ —!”  
  
“I am rectifying this myself,” he says roughly, his eyes blazing into her. He squeezes until spots break out across her vision. “Starting with _you_.”  
  
Her breath leaks out of her in a sickly wheeze. “Ass.”  
  
That’s all the warning he gets before she lodges a knee in his sternum, digging it in as far as it will go.  
  
Air rushes from his lungs in a pained gasp as his grasp goes slack—he’s not very used to fighting without an entire armory of scales surrounding him, the bastard—and rather unpleasantly, his entire weight bears down on her, pinning her to the floor.  
  
“Off,” she repeats into the skin of his shoulder. He smells like salt and ash. She shoves at him, but the only answer she gets is an exhausted croak. “Off, off, _off_!”  
  
She pushes him with every ounce of her considerable strength and he rolls away at last, coming to rest face-up on the ground, panting like he’s run a hundred leagues in a few minutes’ worth of time. Beads of sweat have gathered at his temple, glistening in his hair. He’s shivering, captive to a chill.  
  
His wrist twitches. “I don’t… understand…”  
  
She palms at the soreness circling her throat, coughing. “Shouting’s not so easy when you’re small,” she says, laughing despite everything.”Takes energy.”  
  
“Cursed mortal scum vessel,” Alduin says, chest heaving.  
  
She snorts. “I know, right?”  
  
A clatter distracts them both. “Dragonborn?” Arngeir’s voice comes to them down the hall. “Are you well?”  
  
She reacts first.  
  
“We’re fine!” she yells as best she can, hoping the human won’t be dumb enough to come looking. “Everything’s fine! Don’t worry!”  
  
There’s no vocal reply, which she takes to mean “okay, die on your own, then,” which is more than alright with her—she’s always valued her privacy very highly.  
  
Alduin is glaring at her. Again. He’s apparently forgotten his fatigue. “Where am I?”  
  
She brushes the hair away from her eyes. Their tussle made more than one braid unravel. “I think you know the answer to that question.”  
  
“You brought me to _them_?”  
  
“Would you have rather I let you turn into a pretty icicle?” she retorts. “Because that was an option. In fact, I was asked why I didn’t.” She groans, putting her face in her hands. “ _Why_ didn’t I?”  
  
“Compassion,” Alduin says contemptuously, even though he’s spread-eagled like some badly-drawn figure out of a Dibella leaflet and really has no room to be talking. “It has ever been the downfall of the _joor_.”³  
  
A single, keening note of frustration escapes her. “Could you shut up for one forsaken second? Nocturnal’s tits—I can’t think over your yammering. Go ahead and knock yourself out again, or something.”  
  
He growls at her, much like an overgrown dog, the sound rumbling in his gullet. “I would wring your neck, if I but had the strength.”  
  
She wipes at her cheek. “You’re… still talking.”  
  
“You will undo this or _be_ undone, witch.”  
  
She wants to throw herself at him, and not in the good way. “Now I’m a witch. Marvelous. Also— _I can’t._ Did you miss the part where I said I can’t? Because I can’t. Got that? I _cannot_.”  
  
“You—”

She leaps to her feet. “Stop! I’m not going to _argue_ about this with—with a reptile in the nude—an ungrateful one at that.” He’s helpless to do anything to stop her when she marches over to the bedrolls, bunches up some of the lighter furs, and begins peppering him with them. “Cover up!” Another pelt. “Shut your face.” One more. “And just… just _stay_ there.”  
  
His speech is muffled, but intelligible. “Why am I cold?”  
  
“That’s not shutting your face, _darling_ ,” she snipes.  
  
“Why?”  
  
Y’ffre, it’s like talking to a child. “Because you have skin. We get cold. It happens.”  
  
That seems to satisfy the beast, since he falls suspiciously silent.  
  
She takes the time given to her to gather her bearings, though her curiosity overwhelms her after a few minutes; she creeps over to him and draws the quilt back to reveal he’s fallen asleep—or, more accurately, lost consciousness once more—he certainly looks a sight nicer when he’s calm and not scowling, or sneering, or insulting her and accusing her of ruining his life as overlord dictator of Nirn as she knows it.  
  
It occurs to her that he’s snoozing on stone, and that changing that would involve carrying him over to the bedrolls.  
  
She hopes he has cramps when he wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¹ - "i will burn your ash(es)!"  
> ² - "wing."  
> ³ - "mortal(s)."


End file.
